An uneventful day
by ImaginaryNumber
Summary: "He used to dread the morning paper, holding every day the evidence of his impotence, his inadequacy both physical and moral. Not today though." We follow Finch during an uneventful day, while he reflects on his life and the book he's currently reading.


**Disclaimer:** The character's aren't mine, and I'm not making any money off of them.

**Spoilers:** I suppose there are a few minor spoilers from throughout seasons 1 and 2, but really nothing too drastic. The story makes most sense taking place in the timeline around S1,E5.

**Author's note:** All the quotes that are not attributed are from the book "The Man without Qualities" by Robert Musil.

There's now a second part, "An uneventful day II"; the same day from Reese's POV.

* * *

The alarm clock begins a gentle beeping. Finch wakes up and carefully reaches over to hit the "off" button, with the deliberateness of someone who has painfully learned that reaching too quickly has undesirable outcomes. He next reaches for the spot on the bedside table where he knows his glasses are and his world comes into focus. Easing himself out of the luxurious sheets, he convinces his legs to carry him over an expensive carpet until the marble of the bathroom greets him. His pain medication is waiting next to the sink. All the luxury around him means little until the medication kicks in, and even then it is only a small comfort.

By the time he exits the bathroom, the pain in his back has become tolerable and he takes some pleasure in looking over the outfits he keeps at this house, neatly arranged in a medium size closet. The wireless weather station informs him that it is just over 17C outside, and raining. Perfectly within normal parameters for New York in May. The weather is behaving as it should, and that is comforting to him and contributes to his improving mood, even though the current weather is partially to blame for the level of pain that he woke up with. His mind quickly decides on the outfit to wear, and he efficiently picks out the required items from their respective locations in the closet.

Three phones are lined up on the dresser, and, while checking his outfit in the mirror and fixing his tie, he checks each one quickly for messages that might need his immediate attention. Having convinced himself that nothing drastic has happened in his world - in either of the worlds his personas live in - over night, he proceeds to the hall, where the morning paper is waiting for him, filled with the events in the world that everyone else inhabits.

He used to dread the morning paper, holding every day the evidence of his impotence, his inadequacy both physical and moral. Not today though. Today he opens the paper knowing it will hold evidence that exonerates him, at least for this day. All the previous papers still weight heavy on him, and the future is uncertain, but today, the paper tells of a foiled robbery, complete with picture of the store owner, still alive. Foiled because he finally had the courage to give up some of the predictability of his existence and take a chance in the real world. The courage to put himself into a situation that, despite all the data he had gathered, had an unpredictable outcome. While letting Reese into his life has let to a number of surprises, and he hates surprises, had has to admit that the outcome so far has been much more desirable than expected.

He reads through the paper while his driver takes him to the familiar spot, and the articles in the paper remind Finch of something he just read the previous night, in the book that is currently on the seat next to him.

_"You have to be happy if the politicians and the clergy, and all the rest of those great gentlemen who have nothing better to do at all, [...], do not disturb everyday life. And besides that, you have education. If people would just stop conducting themselves in such an uneducated manner!"_

Finch's brain is able to bring up arbitrary passages from things he has read, especially if he finds them amusing. Finding a good book is one of the things that brighten his life. After exiting the car, he walks a block to the nearest public phone and looks at a nearby camera. The phone rings, he picks up. "Beep." He hangs up and looks back at the camera, hesitant for a moment. No new number for now. Next stop on the list is a cell phone vendor, where he buys two brand new phones, a Samsung and a Motorola. Another passage from the book comes to mind:

_"There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step in the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the balanced levers of a gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence."_

He walks the rest of the way to the library, making sure no one is following him. The people on the street make him uneasy, but he has developed strategies to deal with his unease, and he is relieved when he finally makes it through the gates to their HQ.

He pauses to smile at he books.

_"All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains."_

The room is just like he left it, and arranged just the way he likes. "HQ" he thinks, that is Reese's word. He'll have nearly an hour before Reese will come wandering in. He used to anticipate the arrival of his employee with some trepidation, but he is no longer anxious about the event now. He is starting to accommodate Reese into his life, sometime that takes him longer than most. Reese's shenanigans, some of them expected and some not, certainly do not fall into the normal range of human behaviour. So many of the human actions he has been following in the past year are more than a couple standard deviations off, though, and he has been feeling the tentative grip he thought he had on understanding other people slip.

_"For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically reinforced while unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increasingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibilities available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average."_

Now, after working with Reese for a couple of months, Finch is learning Reese's "normal" and the bounds of where the man will go, and where he will stop. His world, with this new addition in it, is thus becoming more predictable again. There is still a way to go, but it is a good start.

Finch is now sitting at his desk and checking the security camera feeds from around the library. All normal. He relaxes in his chair and and his mind prioritizes his list of tasks.

He has some work to do updating the force pairing software. A new version of Android is out, and he has to figure out the best way to hack it, using the phones he just bought as guinea pigs. However, a mere hour is not enough to do that, and he wouldn't be able to concentrate fully, knowing that interruption will be imminent. So instead, he spends the hour managing Harold Wren's holdings. Something he doesn't enjoy, but it needs to be done nonetheless, and it's easier to get started knowing that the activity is bounded in time.

A soft chiming alerts him to unusual activity on one of the library's surveillance cameras. Reese has arrived. Finch prepares himself for the first real human interaction he's had since the previous afternoon, when they closed their latest case. It feels strange to speak to another person after being in his own head for so many hours, like the first time back on ice skates after a long summer.

"Good morning, Mr. Reese. How did John Warren's dinner meeting with the new executive go?"

"You already know how it went, Finch." Reese says putting the box of donuts on the desk and sitting in the only other chair. Finch waits until his employee is stationary and helps himself to a doughnut, before continuing.

"Yes, I suppose I do, but what is your impression of the man." Finch carefully takes a bite of his doughnut. Icing sugar could ruin his favourite keyboard, and he only has 4 replacements for that particular model left here.

"He's an over-dressed, over-paid, misogynist jerk, and so full of himself, I was expecting him to burst any second. Did I mention he's a bully, too?"

"You seemed pleasant enough around him."

"You TOLD me to be pleasant around him. Remember? Make a good impression in front of my co-workers." Even Finch could tell that Reese was mildly irritated at the memory.

"Well, do you think he'll make a good addition to the company?"

Reese glares at Finch.

"I take that as a 'no'." Reese just keeps glaring. "He'll be fired before the end of the week."

"Just like that?" Reese askes, surprised.

"Yes, just like that." Finch states. Reese's brain seems to have a subroutine concerning people that his is sorely lacking, so Finch makes due by accessing this functionality through an external function call to Reese.

"Maybe I should chat with prospective employees BEFORE you hire them."

"That would be most helpful, Mr. Reese!" Finch says cheerily. "However, I'm afraid the companies I control hire a lot of new employees every month, and you have more important work to do."

"A new number?"

"No, not at this time. I suggest you spend the down time at your _other_ office, performing some more upkeep on your cover identity."

"Are you certain there's no new number?"

"Quite certain, yes."

Reese makes a face that Finch ignores, and leaves. Baring any unforeseen events, Finch will have the rest of the morning to work on the software update. A chunk of unstructured time is just what he needs. He sets the two new phones on the desk and brings up a console window and an Emacs window with the "Forced Pairing" code on one of his screens. He is quickly lost in the intricate elegance of his code. His pained back doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, the mucky, unstructured, unsettlingly chaotic outside world doesn't exist. It is just him and his code, this world of structure and math that he is the master of, and a problem that he has all the tools to solve, that he tackles with the same calm certainty of victory with which Reese walks up to a group of armed thugs.

Just as his stomach starts to rumble, the new phones are on the ground clutching their knees. Time to leave the world of bits and bytes and perfect architecture and reconnect with the real world. He pushes the software update to Reese's phone and is on his way to the diner, looking forward to the time he'll have with the book he's been reading over lunch. He has been marvelling about how relevant the themes of the book, written nearly 100 years ago, seem to his own life, especially since he brought Reese into it: "The Man without Qualities", by austrian author Robert Musil. Finch is intrigued by the description of the main character, a man who at the beginning of the book had just given up a career in the army and comes to the city in search of his place in the world:

_"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, without prejudice, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He somehow always sees a good side to every bad action."_

Finch does not have all the information to fully appreciate the irony of the fact that the main characters in the book spend much time considering the appropriate punishment for a recently caught serial rapist and murderer.

He finishes his french onion soup absentmindedly, lost in his own thoughts and his book until the waiter removing the empty dish brings him back to the present. He is briefly embarrassed by how engrossed he has become in his own thoughts again, looking around to see if anyone has noticed, if he has missed anything going on around him. Everyone is too busy with their own lives though to notices him. He leaves money on the table, squeezes the book under his arm and starts walking towards Harold Wren's office. On the way he stops by a public phone and waits. Again just a beep, he is disappointed and immediately ashamed of the feeling. No one in danger right now, he should be happy. Besides, he has some cover identity maintenance to do himself, the kind that unfortunately can only be done in person.

The meeting he is in carries on seemingly endlessly. His back hurts and he shifts uncomfortably while trying to reconcile the suggestions of the two people who no doubt are the reason for this meeting, concerning the proper way to calculate the hurricane risk of a given geographic area. Why is he in this meeting again? He cannot very well miss every meeting, of course. That would be too suspicious, and it's not a cover identity if no one knows his face. If the meeting was at least an efficient way to get to a solution. But it isn't. It seems the people arguing are less interested in a reasonable solution, and more interested in having a chance to vent.

Since he isn't sure how to appease the warring parties, he resigns himself to the meeting dredging on until the end of its assigned time slot. He pulls out his phone and discretely arranges for the sale of some properties that have served their use. The real estate listings have nothing today that would make a suitable new safe-house. No emails have arrived in the past hour, yet the email server is up and running. The universe has conspired to make him suffer boredom in the presence of irrational people for the rest of this meeting.

Finch wonders if Reese is equally bored and checks the location of his cellphone. He, or at least his cell phone, is at his cover job, too. Finch is surprised that Reese does as he is told so reliably. Discipline is of course something that was drilled into him for a long time, yet he needs very little to no direction to achieve the goal given to him. Finch knows all this in theory, of course. It is one of the reasons why the CIA hired Reese. But experiencing it up close and real like this, well that was as far removed from theory as it gets.

The meeting is finally over. He forces himself to show his face around the office for a while and then takes a cab back to the library. It is a quiet day, as far as his days go, and he feels the need to be with his board of numbers, his books, and away from people. He could walk, but his back hurts and he doesn't want anyone at work to know that he's going somewhere within walking distance.

The cameras stare at him as the cab drives by them and he holds his book close. He wonders what Musil would have written about his machine. With the machine, he managed to bring together the scientific, mechanical, precise on the one hand, and the mystical, the soul, the human heart on the other. It has a good clinical look at the darkness of the human heart, and out of all the messiness and chaos it predicts what is to come. It takes the humans, dissects them and categorizes the pieces, assigning impersonal probabilities. No longer sovereign individuals, but pieces each behaving according to fixed laws, influenced in predictable ways by their surroundings. And the result is a number given to the right person, through the right channels, to prevent large upward deviations from the mean number of human lives extinguished per unit time. The individual was not supposed to matter, not even him, admin, Finch.

_"Let us assume then that a certain set of ideas randomly moves through the present; it results in some kind of most probable mean value, which shifts slowly and automatically. The most important thing however is that our personal, individual movement is irrelevant. We can think left or right, up or down, be unpredictable or reliable: to the average it is all the same, and God and the world care solely about it, not about us!"_

Individual acts of violence should be none of his concern. The world cares only about averages, and he gave them the machine to preserve those. Anything else would have been folly, if only from a practical standpoint. It was not a novel thought. _"A million deaths is a statistic."_ An old saying. Stalin?. But he disregarded the first part of the quote. _"A single death is a tragedy."_ His reason told him what was relevant and what was irrelevant on the larger scale of things. He had to learn through a painful event in his life that from another point of view, the larger scale of things can be utterly irrelevant.

The cab driver receives a generous tip and Finch slips into the library. He stands in front of his board of lost chances for a while, letting sadness wash over him.

_"Any healthy pessimism is based on something inescapable, something to hold onto."_

His rational mind never expected how the numbers would hound him, each single one reminding him of his own pain. A pain that tears them out of the rational and general into the particular, into his heart.

_"In and of itself, the moral human is ridiculous and unpleasant. Moral requires a big task, from which to derive its meaning."_

The world does not care, either way. But he has to. Morals born from pain; compassion really.

Of course he could not have made the machine with that attitude. Making something so powerful, it required a moral rigidity based on reason to not be corrupted by the power.

_"For moral replaces the soul by logic; once a person has morals, no moral questions remain, only logical ones; he asks whether what he wants to do falls under this or that moral command, whether his intention should be interpreted this or another way."_

In handing over the machine, he handed over his responsibility for a population, for the averages, to others. But, as Musil reminds him, all moral becomes immoral if it refuses to make exceptions, to consider special cases. Making no exceptions for the individual had been his mistake, but Nathan realized how he went wrong. It could have been a tragic mistake had Nathan not put in that back door.

The knowledge that this list of numbers was created just to die alone at the end of each day, sentenced to a life without hope, would have destroyed him. In the same way that, according to Reese, taking a life destroys the most important part of you. Of course, getting a number and not doing anything about it was just as bad.

_"Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." _

Voltaire now. Damn that memory of his, sorting through and dredging up excerpts from things he's read all the time.

Finch wonders if Reese fully appreciates what his services mean to him. Each helping the other to be less broken.

_"[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit."_

The phone beeping brings him back to reality. Think of the devil...

"Hi Finch. Do we have a new number yet?"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Reese."

"I thought the numbers never stopped coming."

"You should be happy that no one is in danger right now. Maybe the bad guys are all taking a day off. So should you. Take the rest of the day off."

"Are you sure the machine isn't broken?"

What Finch is not sure about is how to bring across just how ridiculous that question is. The whole framework of the machine is now at the forefront of his mind. Every process, and how they interact. The communication protocols, incoming data stream handling, his ingenious error handling functions. It is all there in his mind, so many details, they overwhelm his ability to formulate a short and general answer. So he says nothing and Reese seems to understand what the momentary silence means.

"Alright, I'll see you tomorrow morning." Reese seems a little lost now.

"Bright and early." Finch says in a manner falling just short of enthusiasm.

Finch goes to the back room and makes himself some tea. While the tea is brewing, he limps around the library checking the security system and the generator. Some day he might give that task to Reese, but not quite yet.

Back in his seat, tea cup in that optimal spot where it is far enough from the keyboard to not pose any spill danger, yet easy to reach, Finch browses through the technology news. His interest in, and need for, spy and surveillance equipment has recently gone up like a step function. He sees interesting components that could be used to make an even smaller GPS transmitter, and orders them through a subsidiary of a company he controls. He is exhilarated, despite himself, at the thought of how those parts might find their use. New hardware, in and of itself, has long since lost much of its charm for him.

Next he brings up recorded conversations from Reese's office, Detective Carters office and, while he's at it, Norman Burdett's answering machine. Nothing noteworthy in any of them. He wonders if the universe really _has _conspired to make this the most uneventful day of his life.

Time to think about plans for the evening. It has been a while since he's had a quiet evening, but he is not sure wallowing in his thoughts much more is a good idea. Not since his life has taken such a hands-on, exciting turn. He briefly considers going to the theatre, but instead calls the maid at the house he left this morning to inform her that Harold Crane will be there for dinner.

His driver is on call at this time and thus ready to pick him up within minutes. Finch closes the library, locking the doors carefully. Getting too attached to things, places, people even, is something he has learned to see as futile, dangerous, something to avoid. Another thing him and Reese have in common, though the greater control Finch has had over the circumstances of his life has left him with more chances to keep relished possessions than the other man has had. However this library that he set up just for the numbers, and now for interfacing with Reese, has grown on him more than he'd like to admit. Nothing else he did these days had so much of his soul attached to it.

He has the driver go slowly by the restaurant where Grace frequently eats on Friday nights. He catches a glimpse of her through the darkened window of the town-car, sitting at the table by herself, drawing. He could have brought up security camera footage, but this is different, more real. An indulgence he allows himself to take part in once in a while.

The driver drops him off at the same house he left this morning. Two nights in the same place, that's acceptable.

The smell of dinner fills the house by the time he gets there. His book and him get comfortable in the living room until dinner is served.

_"Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary." _

After dinner, he puts on a CD of Tchaikovsky pieces performed by various orchestras worldwide. Then it's time to rest.

In the morning, there will certainly be another number. What would his life be now, without the numbers? _That irrational remainder in every orderly life, which in the end brings order into all the things that the rational mind was until then not able to sort out." _Paraphrasing Musil again. That book is really getting to him. All his connections to the world, the ones that were real, that he was into, body and soul, were taken or given up due to the machine. This was the machine's way of giving him back a real connection to the world. After always doing the rational thing, this quest is the irrational remainder to his life, the thing that restores its order.

* * *

_"After a while, nothing much remains of any work but a supply of aphorisms from which friend and foe both take whatever suits them."_

Someone made it to the end. Kudos. Reviews will be appreciated!

If you're at all confused, this might help: wiki/Standard_deviation


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